The Splendid Failure of
Occupation, Part EightAmerican
Modified and Accepted Hitlerism
by B.J. Sabri

www.dissidentvoice.org
March 2, 2004

"All propaganda must
be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid
of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... Through clever and
constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see
paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most
wretched sort of life as paradise."

“The Conscious and
intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses
is an important element in democratic society…It is the intelligent
minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and
systematically. In the active proselytizing of minorities in whom
selfish interests and public interests coincides lie in the progress and
development of America”

We
have tentatively established that mentality is a precursor to ideology,
which in turn acts as a unified system of thought, action, and alibi. In
view of that, ideology and stringent capitalistic control is the locomotive
that has been guiding U.S. power from its early continental colonialistic
expansions, through global imperialistic domination, to its current
hyper-imperialistic consolidation of empire.

Although consolidation is not a condition for
durability or continuity, U.S. expansions remain, so far, unchallenged,
multiform, and go by different names. In the past, they were protectorates,
commonwealth (still active: Puerto Rico), and colonies. At present they
could be: (1) permanent shadow occupation: Germany, Japan, and Panama (2)
ongoing occupation: Bosnia and Kosovo, (3) virtual occupation: Afghanistan,
(4) hard occupation: Iraq, (5) soft occupation: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, (6) political occupation: Spain, Britain, (7)
econo-political occupations: Russia, Poland, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan, (8)
and occupation through trade dependency: China. Other forms of U.S.
imperialistic expansion include manipulation and control of economic
development of nations, installation of military bases in every corner of
the world, direct military interventions, managed military coups, punitive
actions, and willful wars.

While these expansions
vary in nature, their working mechanism is similar and quite simple. The
ideology that guided them, even in relatively peaceful times, hinges on a
constant imperialist mentality marked by racist sentiments of national
grandeur and supported mostly by coercion, military means, and threats of
mass violence. Examples of these ideological sentiments are the evocative
hymn of the marines: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of
Tripoli…”, and the ideological inclusion of God and religion in the minute
details of imperialism and the innate “goodness” of the American purpose.

These sentiments,
together with relentless aggressive expansionist militarism and prospects of
seizing foreign resources and strategic positioning in relation to other
imperialist powers, created peculiar ruses for interventions that the U.S.
conveniently rationalized and condensed into an immutable national policy.
The predilection for interference not only did not change through time, it
became explicit, arrogant, and criminally violent. In an interview
(mid-1990’s) with Jim Lehrer of Public Television, Christopher Warren,
former state secretary, bombastically informed the audience that because
America is the sole remaining superpower, everything that happens in the
world is necessarily the business of the United States.

Contrary to common
opinion and in exclusive psychological terms, the tendency for violent
intervention in the affairs of the world is a symptom of internal failure in
the mechanism of imperialistic control. Explanation: Since American ruling
elites well know that economic measures alone cannot defeat an adversary,
their reliance on military means to impose a forceful solution is an
indication that imperialism cannot prevail as far as reason is concerned.
This is failure. It demonstrates that if reason and negotiation can prevail,
force will silence them. The proclivity to silence reason in favor of
violence and show of force is terrorization. Ultimately, terrorization is a
two-edge sword. On one side, it may achieve its temporary objectives; on the
other, it creates a vehement opposition including counter-violence aiming at
annulling those same objectives and fighting those who want to achieve
them.

Further, because the
aura and philosophy of intervention, construed as an abstract ideology of
national grandeur, have always been an alibi for either projected or
immediate material imperialistic gain, this brings us to question the entire
concept of nationalistic grandeur in the context of military interventions.
What is the value of this grandeur if war and violence are the means to
achieve it, and why the constant American references to slogans such as,
“the greatest nation on earth”, “the strongest country in history”, or “the
only remaining superpower”, etc.?” Can the U.S. exist without such
ideologically exaggerated notions of self-importance? Of course it can; but
even if it cannot, why must those notions be fascist and interventionist? If
the greatness of a nation means reaching sublime levels of development and
respect for human rights and dignity, then I do not see how greatness can
apply to aggressive powers in a perpetual search for nations to invade and
exploit.

Our purpose, then, is
to establish reliable analytical patterns, where we can assertively affirm
that American imperialist and hyper-imperialist military interventionism
abroad rely on a violent ideological matrix of grandeur similar to that of
Hitlerism (I partly explained why I chose Hitlerism to represent violence in
part seven). From an attentive comparison between the tenets and deeds
of the American and Hitlerian matrices, it is not difficult to observe a few
astounding similarities. These include racism, national superiority complex,
organized international violence, territorial expansionism, as well as
mythological aggrandizement of one’s own civilization, justificatory fascist
mentality, and vocabulary of debasement toward non-white and non-European
nations.

Curiously, the most
striking element of resemblance between the theory and praxis of Hitlerism
and the ideology of the American Empire is the ease with which both can
inflict mass killing on nations and groups. This ease may have interior
motive: it is an expression of direct or indirect racism where the life of
those attacked means nothing to the attackers.

The idea of racism is
more than possible. In the American example, and during the incessant
building of empire, racist tenets targeting Native Nations, underpinned
American expansion and transformed the colonies into a modern state. At the
same time, however, it transformed the essence of what I call, “retroactive
and timeless racist Hitlerism” into an easy absorbable everyday American
culture, and into a perpetual mechanism for an over-inflated nationalistic
glorification. (After the American orgy of mass killing called the Gulf War
(1991), the U.S. celebrated the blood fiesta in a victory parade in New York
City, as if it won against an inter-galactic empire!)

Under these
interactions, while the true motive of American military enterprises is
implementing imperialism, their ideological impetus originates from
miscellaneous colorful pretenses such as, “greatness by divine grace”
and “singular virtues” of the economic and political systems. At this point,
brace yourself for a ride into the hallucinating world of American
imperialism: we ended up with a bizarre theological covenant between God and
empire. In it, a busy, over stretched, and an exhausted God has to drop
everything that he is doing and runs to bless America every time a U.S.
president routinely invokes him to do so, and every time he sees cheering
crowds wave the flags. We have no idea if the covenant includes clauses
whereby God must extend his blessing to the annexation of Texas, the Vietnam
War, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, and the Kissinger arranged coup
in Chile!

The point of all this,
is that from observing the dynamics and history of conquests, we know that
the ideology of self-entitlement, as motivated by multiple confluent factors
such as gain and sense of superiority, is the active ingredient of
imperialism. Decidedly, without self-entitlement imperialism cannot persist
to exist. Under these circumstances, the war and occupation of Iraq has
irrevocably removed all remaining veneers from an oppressive racist empire
that made wars of conquest its daily bread and butter. In one word, the U.S.
can now attack any non-nuclear country (although this is only partially
true, as the U.S. could attack nuclear Pakistan or India but not nuclear
Russia or China – Pakistan and India cannot retaliate, Russia and China can)
by simply inventing something about it. Consequently, as hyper-imperialism
reinforced the military ingredients (gain from war, and “glory”) that make
imperialism tick, it elevated the notion of self-entitlement to an exclusive
privilege of the American hyper-empire.

Self-entitlement,
especially within the context of imperialism, is a product of specific
ideology and historical processes of power that finds its justificatory
acceptance at most levels of society. Conversely, an ideology that cannot
penetrate the social strata of a nation will not have the necessary means to
survive. As a result, to establish a relation between a state’s ideology and
society in relation to imperialistic conquests, we assert that a strongly
manipulated mentality make the American people willful participants in the
promotion of the U.S. interventionist conduct.

Regardless of how this
mentality is manipulated, spread or diverse, its distribution among the
population reveals indoctrination patterns where acceptance, defense, or
rejection of foreign policy matters never deviates from pertinently
established guidelines. Even the genuine opposition to the system, which at
times is cogent and implacable, is normally composed, intellectual,
theoretical, and rhetorical, and has no practical consequences on hardened
imperialistic sentiments or on the mechanism of political change. In
essence, the American system is now a static mechanism of self-repeating
cycles of cultural-political modalities where times and faces keep changing,
but nothing else in the basic system of government and ideology of power.

To confirm the
manifestation of manipulated mentality as it applies to U.S. wars, limited
massive American antiwar demonstrations did not stop the march to war
against Iraq, nor was the general population interested in the matter. This
is mainly because the whole system appeared immovable in its convictions and
on how to proceed in an ocean of propagandistic miasma. Thus, the decisions
for going to war remained the privilege of a small minority with colluded
interests. Further, as the war is now entering in a phase of a stalemated
conquest, the steam of dissension has virtually vanished, and no one is
seriously pushing to end the military occupation of Iraq, even after all
machinations and lies for the invasion floated up to the surface. Therefore,
and based on a low count of American fatalities and sanitized reporting on
war and Iraqi fatalities, it appears that, from an American perspective, the
American people have accepted the imperialistic occupation of Iraq as a
natural conclusion to a fastidious story.

A mentality of
grandeur works in many ways. On an intellectual level, for example, Stephen
E. Ambrose, an American historian, exemplifies this when he reviews Geoffrey
Perret’s A Country Made By War. Says Ambrose in a flattering
encomium: “[A] classic work, easily the best single volume on the American
military experience yet.” Four things emerge from reading the book and from
the fourteen words of Ambrose: (1) Perret insinuated that only wars made
America; and by that, he implied that since war made it, the immense
contribution that generations of Americans gave to the making is immaterial.
(2) As he emphatically affirmed that America is a “country made by war”, he
indirectly confirmed that America is a product of extreme violence and
destruction, which is what war is. (3) Ambrose, on the other hand, proudly
concluded that America’s wars against the world are only a military
experience in the curve of American development. (4) Moreover, the use
of the adverb “yet” to denote the placement of Perret’s book in relation to
future books on the subject, confirms that the American war “experience”
could still expand into the future. In fact, as per predictable prophesy,
the U.S. punctually reprised its wars more violently than ever, since Perret
published his work in 1990.

To give a practical
example on how Hitlerian mentality works on a popular level, it is
instructive to recall the invasion of Panama. George H. Bush invaded Panama,
killed over 4000 Panamanians [3], and abducted its
president (whom the U.S. itself installed) without any one raising
objections or questions. The American people, at large, were either
indifferent or just accepted Bush’s claim that Noriega was involved in drugs
and money laundering. As for the true motives, they all went unnoticed.
These included the future defense of the Panama Canal after expiration of
treaty, the abolishment of the Panamanian Defense Forces (the U.S. would
then remain the guardian), the testing of new weapons including the stealth
bomber, and giving a show of force for leftist movements in Latin America
and to a moribund USSR. The point here is that the killing of all those
innocent Panamanians did not disturb the sleep and conscience of the
majority of U.S. citizens.

A generalized mentality of fascism can express
itself on other levels. In the world of journalism, for example, it takes
the shape of a scheming language aimed at altering perceptions. Take The
Guardian (a British daily) for example, when it reports on the Iraqi
resistance to the imperialist Anglo-American occupation. The Guardian
tabulates the “reports” on the resistance under the small headline:
“Violence and Unrest.” To what and whose violence is the Guardian alluding?
And why did it call the Iraqi acts of resistance unrest? This is as if to
say that the situation in Iraq is not a result of war and occupation but
because of “civil unrest” of a population defying their local authority.

Another example is The
New York Times, the sophisticated temple of U.S. Zionism. The NYT places its
rubric on the mass slaughter of Iraqis consequent to the invasion under a
minuscule headline, called “Killed in Iraq”, as if that killing is
accidental and happened during an excursion, and not in an ongoing war
between invaders and invaded. [4] Let us see some numbers,
The New York Times puts the maximum number of Iraqi civilian fatalities at
9,792 and military fatalities at 6,370 thus the total is 16,162, while it
puts combat fatalities by invaders and mercenaries at 568.

Before everything,
note that the U.S. killed more civilians than military personnel. Second,
even if we take at face value the number of Iraqi fatalities, we have to ask
one big question: why did the U.S. kill 16,162 Iraqis? Did this mass killing
happen because (1) Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Powell claimed Iraq possessed WMD
that after 11 months of occupation could not be found; (2) because the were
“terrorists responsible for 9/11” (3) the U.S. cannot achieve conquest
without killing; or (4) are there other motives? Based on the history of the
American rationale and true purpose for invading Iraq, while hypothesis
number three is a sure winner, hypothesis number four is another winner but
requires elaboration that we shall discuss later in the series.

Based on this
discussion, we can conclude that the main tie that binds the mentality of
American fascism to a popular acquiescence to its manifestation is the
indifference to death caused by countless U.S. aggressions abroad. This
acquiescence is the ideological humus that fascism needs to prosper and
spread.

If the American people
reject the characterization of Hitlerism or fascism applied to the actions
of the U.S. government around the world, then where is their reaction to the
death of those Iraqis, which is an expression of a Hitlerian mentality? Did
the U.S. not raise hell when an alleged al-Qaida terrorist attack
killed 3000 innocent people in New York City? So, why can we not raise hell
for the killing of 16,162 innocent Iraqis because Zionists, imperialists,
militarists, Halliburton-ists, Bechtel-ists, and fanatic religious crusaders
decided that Iraqis must die on the altar of “civilized” American Hitlerism
and its manufactured alibis?

Moreover, and except
for a respectable minority, why is the majority silent? Further, based on
what criteria does the U.S. consider its crimes a product of innocent
chromosomal purity, while considering the crimes of others a product of
inborn wickedness? Of course this is an ideological manipulation of crime;
but the pattern of beatitude and innocence that the U.S. attaches to its
crimes has been going on before and after the rise of the American state,
and the osmosis between state and society to implement violent philosophy
against other nations, has never known any interruption or revision up until
present.

Robert Jay Lifton and
Eric Marcusen clarify my concept on the idea of societal participation in
mass killing when they talk about the Nazi Holocaust. [5]
Their analysis, however, is perfectly applicable to Korea, Vietnam,
Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq regardless of the size of killing and
motive. On a practical ground I find no difference between mass killing and
genocide – these are techno-ideological subtleties, and in using one but not
the other to describe the killing of targeted people, the user tries to
either minimize or maximize the extent or scope of killing.

Say the authors:

“Nazi genocide took on
the quality of a silent, collective crusade, involving not just the
bureaucracy of killing but German society as whole. As Hitler anticipated,
many within the German society “were eagerly prepared to take the
initiative” in carrying the program out, many more would take part “as long
as their participation could be made part of an unthinking routine or job.”

Can we apply the jest
of what Lifton and Marcusen are saying to the Iraqi example? The answer is a
categorical yes. Indeed, with the exception of the antiwar movements, many
segments of the American people rejecting Bush’s war mania, a multitude of
wise politicians within the system, and numerous ardent antiwar public
personalities, the majority was either part of the hysteria to invade Iraq
or showed indifference to the project, which we can construe as consent.
That majority did not care to ask questions on motives and the implication
of using American war technology on defenseless people. A question: If
something of this nature is applicable on Germany vs. Jews, why can it not
be applicable on America vs. Iraqis?” Why do two different criminal intents
with similar outcomes, despite differences, receive a different and
selective treatment?

Answer: national
supremacist beliefs normally lead to ideological and privileged
discriminations on who inflicts violence and on who receives it, which leads
to an expedient notion of self-righteous entitlement in relation to the
application of violence, which leads to the creation of alibis of innocence
and redemption, which in the end lead to the consecration of the sense of
self-superiority and unaccountability. In other words, it is a self-nurtured
and perpetual cycle where imperialist violence becomes deep-rooted and
accepted as a natural course of a “virtuous democracy”, and as a symbol of
national power whereby U.S. ruling classes and large segments of the
population see themselves above the super-normal and beyond the
extra-ordinary.

An example of accepted
organized military violence in social life is noticeable when newspapers,
magazines, and television programs publish or air information about
financial markets, sex, toys, cosmetics, celebrities, automobiles, and wars,
in a way that war appears as an ordinary subject, since it is
appearing among other ordinary subjects. Accordingly, is it possible
then to hypothesize that we are dealing with a seriously deranged system
where deep-rooted Hitlerian attitudes of perceived paramount
perfection and national superiority are at work here, and where news of
death and destruction of small nations means nothing to the majority?

The answer is a robust
yes, but with a qualification. Hitlerian attitudes are the product of
historical conjectures and cultures of a state, its power, and the
population that supplies its continuity regardless of prevailing subjective
realities. Consider this, while in a classical fascist state a strict
minority exercises tight control over foreign policy issues, in the American
super-state, similar control exists as when just two elected persons, the
president and the vice-president, and their appointed officials set and
execute foreign policy matters and military interventions as per special and
personal interests without debate or control.

Having provided, at
this point, potential ideological connections between mentality rendered
predisposed to accept fascism as expressed in military interventions, and
between the ability of the state to satisfy the material expectations placed
on that same mentality, defining “American Modified and Accepted Hitlerism”
therefore would only be a matter of conceptual transition. I shall base my
understanding of “AMAH” on how the U.S. is projecting it externally through
official rhetoric, manifestations of structured mentality, military power,
culture of war, culture of mass killing as an expression of power, and
imperialistic rationalizations, but leaving out from the discussion the
nature and functions of domestic institutions and social issues. These are
distinct subjects. Consequently, what is, “American Modified
and Accepted Hitlerism” or “AMAH?

I coined “AMAH” to
denote a constructed American ideological platform whereby:

“Essential traits of
Hitlerism are coherently present in a self-serving American paradigm that
is the core of U.S. strategic thinking, military posture, and projection of
power, whereby the policy of military interventions, aggressions, invasions,
conquest, mass killing, mass destruction, and genocide as motivated by
ideology and imperialism, is accepted as long as the U.S. is the doer,
and whereby propaganda, deception, and mass control act as cohesive force to
induce popular acceptance for that policy.”

In part nine, we shall
discuss foreign policy as a privilege of the executive branch, explain each
term of “AMAH”, and then proceed to explore how the passage from mentality
to ideology and from ideology to practice manifests itself, thus enshrining
“AMAH” as an ordinary national attitude.

Incidentally, how did
we reach such a provocative conclusion that would make some cringe for the
audacity to parallel “democratic” America with Hitlerism? In addition,
because the imperialistic racism and atrocities of the former British and
French Empires could easily emulate and exceed that of Hitler’s Germany,
then why can we not use their examples instead of the ubiquitous and trite
Hitlerism? Take Winston Churchill – an admirer of Hitler -- for example.
[6] If we compare Churchill’s colonialist ideology with
that of the supremacist Hitler, we can hardly see any substantial difference
between the two. Both were bloody, racist, fascist, and imperialist, so why
do we not use Churchill as a yardstick of Hitlerism?

Next, Part 9: American
Modified and Accepted Hitlerism: General Dynamics

B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American
anti-war activist. He can be reached at:
bjsabr@yahoo.com.